"Morphia," she replied.
There was a long silence.
"Morphia, that was the beginning and the middle and the end of my misfortunes," she said. "What did I do that gradually lost me my friends?—and I had such good friends, even after my best friend my sister died. What did I do that ruined me by inches? In Australia I have heard of evil men taken red-handed being left in the bush with food and water by them, bound to a fallen tree which has been set on fire at one end. And the fire smoulders and smoulders, and travels inch by inch along the trunk, and they watch their slow, inevitable death coming towards them day by day, until it at last destroys them also inch by inch. What had I done that I should find myself bound like those poor wretches? I cannot tell you. Morphia wipes out the memory as surely as drink. I only know that I was in torment. Faces, familiar and strange faces, some compassionate, some indignant, some horror-struck, come back to me sometimes, blurred as by smoke, but I see nothing clearly. I dimly remember fragments of appeals that were made to me, fragments of divine music in cathedrals where I sobbed my heart out. Broken, splintered, devastating memories of promises made in bitter tears, and endless lies and subterfuges to conceal what I could not conceal. For morphia looks out of the eyes of its victim. I knew that, but I thought no one could see it in mine, that I could hide it. And I have one vivid recollection of a quiet room with flowers in it, and latticed windows, but I don't know where it was or how I came there, or who were the people in it who spoke to me. There was a tall woman with grey parted hair in a lilac gown. I can see her now. And I swore before God that I had left off the drug. And some one standing behind me took the little infernal machine out of my pocket, and I was confronted with it. And the tall woman wrung her hands and groaned. How I hated her! And in my madness I accused her of putting it there to ruin me. And some one (a man) said slowly, 'She is impossible!—quite impossible!' That one memory stands out like a little oasis in a desert of mirage and shifting sand, and thirst. I should know the room again if I saw it. There was a window opening into a little paved courtyard with a fountain in it, and doves drinking. But I shall never see it again. And the drug became alive like a fiend, and pushed me lower and lower, down, always down, until I did something dreadful, I don't know now exactly what it was, though the prison chaplain explained it to me. But it was about a cheque, and I was convicted and sent to prison."
"Then you have been in prison twice?" I said, anxious to make it easy for her to be entirely truthful, for I could not doubt the truth of much of this earlier history.
She did not seem to hear me.
"There is no crime," she went on, "however black, that I did not expiate then. If suffering can wash out sins, I washed out mine. I, who thought I had so many enemies, have no enemy. No one has ever injured me. But if I had the cruellest in the world, I would not condemn him, if he were a morphia maniac, to sudden enforced abstinence and prison life. And I could not die. I am very strong by nature. I could neither die nor live. It was months before I saw light, months of hell, consumed in the flame of hell which is thirst. And slowly the power to live came back to me. I was saved in spite of myself. And slowly the power of thought returned to me. I had time to think. My mind drifted and drifted, but I got control of it now and again, and then for longer intervals, as my poor body reasserted itself from the slavery of the drug. And I thought—I thought—I thought. And at last I made up my mind, my fierce, embittered mind. And when I came out of prison, I took to the road. Even then there were those who would have helped me, but I steeled my heart against them. There was a strange woman with a sweet face waiting at the prison door, who spoke kindly to me. But I distrusted her. I distrusted every one. And I did not mean to be helped any more. I had been helped time and time again. To be helped was to be put where I could get morphia, where I had something, if it was only my clothes, which I could sell to get it, where I could steal things to sell to get it. If I had any possessions, I knew that some day—not for a time perhaps, but some day—I should sell it and get morphia somehow. They say you can't buy it, but you can. I always could in the past, and I knew I always should in the future. But on the road, in rags, a tramp, down in the dust, in the safe refuge of the dust—there it was not possible. There I was out of temptation. There I could not be burned in that flame again. That was all I thought of, to creep away where the fire could not reach me. And I felt sure I should not live long. In my ignorance I thought the exposure to all weathers, and privation, and the first frost of winter would bring me my release quickly. But they did not. They gave me new life instead. I came out in spring, and I begged my way to Abinger Forest, and nearly starved there; but I did not mind. Have you ever been in Abinger Forest in the spring when the wortleberry is out? Can the Elysian fields of Asphodel be more beautiful? Perhaps to others they might seem so; but not to me. My first glimpse of hope came to me in the woods at Abinger in a windless, sunny week at Easter. The gipsies gave me food once or twice. And I ate the scraps that the trippers left after their picnics at the top of Leith Hill where the tower is. And I lay in the sun by day and I slept in a stack of bracken by night, and my strained life relaxed. And I, who had become so hard and bitter, saw at last what endless love and compassion had been vainly lavished on me, and I was humbled. I had somehow got it rooted into my warped mind that I had been cruelly treated, betrayed, abandoned by my friends, by every one. I had tried hard to forgive them, but I could not. I saw at last that it was I who had been cruel, I who had betrayed, I who needed forgiveness; and I asked it of the only Friend I had left, the only Friend Who never forsakes us. And peace came back and the deep wound in my life healed. It seemed as if Nature, who had forgotten me for so long, had pity on me, and took me again to her heart. For I had loved her years ago, before my husband died.
"When the weather broke, I took to the road, and the road has given me back my health, and much more than health. I can see beauty again now. And there is always beauty in the hedgerow; and wherever the road runs there is beauty. In the open down, beside the tidal rivers with their brown sails creeping among the buttercups, everywhere there is beauty. And I can sleep again now. I learnt how to sleep at Abinger. I had forgotten how it was done without morphia. O God! I can sleep, every night, anywhere. It's worth being a tramp for that alone, to be able to sleep naturally, to know in the daytime that you will have it at night, and then to lie down and feel it stealing over you like the blessing of God. I used to wake myself at first for sheer joy when it was coming. And then to nestle down, and sink into it, down, down into it, till one reaches the great peace. And no more wakings in torment as the drug passes off, waking as in some iron grave, unable to stir hand or foot, unable to beat back the suffocating horror and terror which lies cheek to cheek with us. No more wakings in hell. No more mornings like that. But instead, the cool, sweet waking in the crystal light in the open air. And to see the sun come up, and to lie still against the clean, fragrant haystack and let it warm you! And to watch the quiet, friendly beasts rise up in the long meadows! And to wake hungry, instead of that dreadful, maddening thirst! And to like to eat—how good that is, even if you go fasting half the day! But I never do. The poor will always give you enough to eat. It hurts them to see any one hungry. Yes, I have dropped down the ladder rung by rung, and now I have reached the lowest rung. And it is a good place, the only safe place for wastrels such as I, the only refuge from my enemy. There is peace on the lowest rung. I can do no more harm there, and I have done so much. I was ambitious once, I was admired and clever once; but I found no abiding city anywhere. Temptation lurked everywhere. I was driven like chaff before the wind.... But now I have the road. No one will take the road from me while I live, or the ditch beside it to die in when my time comes. I am provided for at last. I lead a clean life at last."
She sat silent, her dreamy eyes fixed, her thin hands folded one over the other. I looked at her with an aching heart. What strange mixture of truth and lies was all this! But I said nothing. What was the use?
And as we sat silent beside the dying fire the great inequality between us pressed hard upon me: I, by no special virtue of my own, God knows! on one of the uppermost rungs of life. She poor soul—poor soul—on the lowest.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed eleven.